


An English Unofficial Rose

by Prochytes



Category: Magnum P.I. (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, Homesickness, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:21:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27193702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: Home thoughts, from abroad.
Relationships: Juliet Higgins & Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	An English Unofficial Rose

**Author's Note:**

> No significant spoilers.

The sea was it again.

The wind had picked up in the night. As usual, this brought in a dawn harvest of noisy foam. Juliet awoke to a particularly flamboyant crash of wave on sand. An Englishwoman’s reflex to such marine alarums was to tunnel back into the bedsheets, gathering herself against the prospect of a chilly morning. But the Pacific was not the North Sea. The day would not be cold; the day was never cold.

Juliet had not seen the sea until she was eight years old. Magnum, she knew, found this impossible to believe. This was, in part, due to his general sense (not uncommon, in Juliet’s experience, amongst Americans) that everywhere in Great Britain was basically visible from everywhere else. Juliet understood the error: on a map, teetering like some preposterous hood ornament on the bonnet of continental Europe, her homeland looked like you could step across it. She suspected that her own undifferentiated sense of the U.S. – the vast, vague spaces of Steinbeck Country – was equally at fault. Neither of their former professional lives had seen service in each other’s domestic acres. She sympathized with Magnum, for this error. She had no intention of telling him that.

The other root of Magnum’s incredulity lay in knowledge, rather than ignorance. He was a Navy man, although he wore it lightly, and aware of Britain’s history with the sea. Juliet had already had to put up with a stanza or two of _Rule Britannia_. She sensed that it was only a matter of time before she was treated to _Heart of Oak_.

Generations of Juliet’s country-men and –women had lived and died at the mercy of the waves. Those, like Juliet, who hadn’t, met the old grey widow-maker with a compound of unease, sentiment, and nostalgia: half saucy postcards; half John of Gaunt. The brash glare of the Pacific was something else.

Juliet could not really express this. So she didn’t.

***

Out of bed, then, and so to the first work-out of the day.

In the opening weeks of their acquaintance, Juliet had concealed her callisthenics from Magnum altogether. This was an instinct from her former life. Juliet had found no profit in laying her full resources, mental or physical, on the table for all to see. The name for doing that in bridge was “dummy”.

Juliet’s policy had subsequently softened. There was no harm in letting Magnum see the yoga. The kata drills, however, she still preferred to run through before he woke. Magnum – like his ultimate exemplar, Sherlock Holmes – rose late, when he hadn’t been up all night. It is the fate of private investigators to flip the day, and see what festoons the exposed under-side before it writhes away.

Her muscles were knotting, a little sooner in the routine than was quite pleasing. Juliet breathed. She took in the scent of flowers that Kumu had unavailingly named for her. Expat life is alternately bereaved and bludgeoned by its smells. At Cambridge, Juliet had lived for two years amongst corridors of stone built before Magnum’s nation. The principal smell she remembered from that time was of the kebab vans near Christ's Pieces, which, along with Sainsbury's vodka, had been a key out-of-hours source of student sustenance.

Juliet wondered whether she would ever tell Magnum that “shandy”, a concept with which he had latterly fallen in love, was, back in her homeland, a drink for children. She doubted it. There was a rubicund warmth to Magnum’s vision of the U.K. – a panorama that encompassed high tea, Beefeaters, “gor’ blimey” and, inevitably, _Mary Poppins_. Juliet did not have the heart to replace that with another vision, of something crouching, wary, amidst the ruins of empire: something slight, hard, and less classy than it let others think it was.

Something much like Juliet, in fact.

***

After exercise, a tour of Robin’s Nest. A wind of last night’s magnitude might have torn something loose. In Juliet’s second job, as in her first, it was important that belongings were returned to exactly the position in which they had been left.

All was in order. Robin’s Nest had lost none of its brood. Juliet caught herself, and frowned; she disliked playing into her employer’s imagery. Much as she personally esteemed Robin Masters, she did not trust him with a loaded metaphor.

But thoughts of England did bring one to birds. The youngest wren of nine. _Swallows and Amazons_ , which Juliet, like most children of her generation, had not read. One’s country is less about what one knows, and more about what one knows that one can get away with not knowing.

Juliet could hear Magnum stirring, somewhat earlier than was usual. She recalled that Rick and T. C. were expected, later, and that the trio would be heading out. The quest for that elusive beast, a presentable shirt he hadn’t worn yet, could easily occupy Magnum for several hours.

 _Ohana_ , which Kumu said T. C. and Rick were to Magnum, was not a thing Juliet could get away with not knowing. She understood the shape of it; caught the afterglow of its warmth in Magnum’s private smile after he hung up on either of the others. For now, though, it was intelligible to Juliet, but remote, like faith in the dead gods of the distant, tideless sea who had bequeathed their names to the two boys.

Zeus and Apollo trotted up for feeding. Juliet ruffled their ears; and prepared herself for the rigours of another perfect day.

FINIS

**Author's Note:**

> Juliet's memory runs through phrases from Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_ and Kipling's "Harp Song of the Dane Women". Many thanks to arachnekallisti for some local colour.


End file.
